WUI (Writing under the influence)

...money for my children's college is only half of the challenge. The other half is to find college that will not brainwash them into the liberal ideology.

In his recent opinion piece, Jeff Jacoby says:

"The left-wing takeover of American universities is an old story. In 1951, William F. Buckley Jr. created a sensation with "God and Man at Yale," which documented the socialist and atheist worldview that even then prevailed in the classrooms of the Ivy League institution he had just graduated from.

"Today campus leftism is not merely prevalent. It is radical, aggressive, and deeply intolerant, as another newly minted graduate of another prominent university -- Ben Shapiro of UCLA -- shows in "Brainwashed," a recent bestseller. "Under higher education's facade of objectivity," Shapiro writes, "lies a grave and overpowering bias" -- a charge he backs up with example after freakish example of academics going to ideological extremes."

Radical, aggressive, and deeply intolerant. Sounds familiar...

Daniel Pipes describes a very recent incident when a radical, aggressive and deeply intolerant prof went Gore when his obvious anti-semitism was challenged by a student:

"The incident began late on Sept. 27, 2004, when Victor Luria, a Ph.D. candidate in genetics and a former soldier in the Israel Defense Forces, wrote Dabashi an e-mail taking strong exception to what Dabashi had written about the IDF in an article [...]

"Rather than answer Luria's critique, Dabashi early on Sept. 28 forwarded his note to several top Columbia officials, including the university's provost, Alan Brinkley. He also commented on what Luria had written:

"I consider this slanderous harassment a conduct unbecoming of a student of Columbia University towards a member of the faculty whom he has never met or known. I bring this defamatory attack against a Columbia faculty to the judicious attention of your respective offices. Given the military record of this person, I also feel physically threatened. I would be grateful if Columbia Security were also to be informed of this slanderous attack against my character and appropriate measures taken to protect my person from a potential attack by a militant slanderer."

How idiotic! Just because somebody challenges something you have written in a public forum you feel attacked, physically threatened even? What do you expect? That your insane, even dangerous ideas will be published for all to see and for some to accept as gospel, but never rebutted? You are not just some weirdo with a keyboard spewing nonsense into the abyss of the Internet. You are a prof who has power over his students who often feel too intimidated to challenge you for fear of reprisal.

There has to be somebody else watching over everything you write.

The good news is that there are many common sense gate keepers already. One of them, Mike Adams, has recently challenged one such prof and the result is hilarious.

The whole thing started when Dr. Adams was notified by an oppressed student that his prof was rather intolerant to conservative views.

The prof, for example, told his students that certain topics for their term papers are simply off limits:

"Topics on which there is, in my opinion, no other side apart from chauvinistic, religious, or bigoted opinions and pseudo-science (for example, female circumcision, prayer in public schools, same-sex marriage, the so-called faith-based initiative, abortion, hate crime laws, the existence of the Holocaust, and so-called creationism)"

So the prof puts abortion and hate crime laws into the same bin as Holocaust revisionism. Interesting.

Dr. Adams offered the following topics for prof's consideration:

"How have Professor Snider and his cronies converted the college classroom into a platform for their warped political beliefs?
Why does Professor Snider refer to a fetus as a “potential child” after saying that abortion is not debatable in his class?
How does Professor Snider identify “Topics on which there is, in (his) opinion, no other side apart from chauvinistic, religious, or bigoted opinions and pseudo-science?”
Does Professor Snider’s emotional involvement with the issue of homosexuality cause him to violate the religious freedom of his students?
Is Professor Snider “heterophobic?”
Does Professor Snider’s intolerance and ignorance of the First Amendment mean that all “queer critics” are intolerant, ignorant, or both?
Should college students be allowed to wear “shut up and teach” t-shirts to class at California State University, Long Beach?"

I wish I could be this funny when attacking challenging some liberal profs.

First, the prof threatened with a lawsuit. How typical. Then he warned his students that somebody was illegally using material from his website. He also added, however, that the students were really not limited when choosing topics for their paper and that he "believe[d] in and practice[d] academic freedom." I wish I could be this funny...

Needless to say, I'm waiting for the next installment with great anticipation.

BTW, Dr. Adams receives a lot of hate mail; I guess this should be expected in this line of work.

Another thing that I find really peculiar is that whenever these profs are challenged they invariably respond with something like "you can't silence me, I have freedom to say whatever I want." Of course you do! But I have the same freedom to say how wrong your ideas are. Lastly, I can't help you when you feel personally attacked. One possible explanation is that you define your being by the ideas you espouse. You may also equate speech with physical violence. After all, the left invented this whole idea of hate speech.